The actor and singer Paddie O'Neil, who has died aged 83, was best known for many stage and screen appearances with her husband, Alfred Marks, but she was also a notable performer in her own right.

Her first film, Penny Points to Paradise (1951), also featured the big-screen debuts of Marks, Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan. Harry Secombe starred in the knockabout farce, which was released in the same month that he, Sellers and Milligan were first heard on BBC radio as the Goons. Like the others in this low-budget picture, which was shot in Brighton over three weeks, O'Neil had a background in variety and was able to recreate some of her act, including impersonations of Bette Davis and Gloria Swanson.

Already known as compere of the BBC radio series Navy Mixture, O'Neil had also starred with Marks in a television sketch show, Don't Look Now (1950). They married in 1952 and worked both together and apart until his death in 1996.

The daughter of Jack Nail, a lion tamer known as Professor Nail, Paddie was born Adalena Lillian Nail in a fairground trailer in Leominster, Herefordshire. At the age of four, she was persuaded by Jack to stand in the lion's cage, singing Daddy Wouldn't Buy Me a Bow Wow. She went to stage school in London and made her professional debut at the Palladium, aged 16. Understudying the singer Elisabeth Welch, she was called up on stage and was spotted by the BBC.

O'Neil met Marks when they both appeared in a stage show called Mon Martre, in Brighton. They found their biggest audience in the ITV sketch show Alfred Marks Time (1956-59). Sellers and Milligan – who had been their neighbours in Highgate, north London – were among the guests on the show, and O'Neil sang regularly with the Ray Ellington Quartet. Husband and wife appeared together again, as the King and Queen of Hearts, in a London Palladium pantomime, Humpty Dumpty (1959-60), starring Secombe.

Although variety was on the wane, O'Neil continued to appear on stage with Marks until the mid-80s. She also found that slapstick was still in demand when she played a landlady in the film The Early Bird (1965) and featured in a 10-minute comedy sequence with its star, Norman Wisdom.

She appeared on screen in the fantasy The Adding Machine (starring Milo O'Shea and Phyllis Diller, 1969), the romp Fanny Hill (as the shrewd madam, 1983) and the musical The Little Match Girl (as the cook, 1987).

The all-round performer found a new audience when she appeared in children's TV programmes. She joined the cast of Rentaghost as Queen Matilda, "the dreaded tyrant of the 12th century" (1981-83), and later acted in the first series of Woof! (1989).

O'Neil also popped up in the sitcoms Pig in the Middle (1981), Nobody's Perfect (1982) and Hallelujah! (1983), and in Jack Rosenthal's adaptation of the Noël Coward story Mrs Capper's Birthday (1985). Her last screen role was in an episode of the crime series Virtual Murder (1992).

On stage, she played Mrs Pavlenko in Dick Vosburgh and Frank Lazarus's award-winning musical pastiche A Day in Hollywood, a Night in the Ukraine (complete with impersonations of Davis and Katharine Hepburn, 1979) and Lady Brockhurst in a revival of The Boy Friend (Old Vic and Albery, 1984).

O'Neil was appointed OBE in 1976. She is survived by a son and a daughter.